I'm a teacher!... sort of

I survived my first week of classes! Granted, it was just a 3-day week but, trust me, even surviving that made it a celebratory occasion. In fact we, my fellow trainees AND our trainer, did just that at the end of the day tonight... via a lovely little outdoor place with fine Chilean vino near the academy. Here is a picture of my little class. It's a GREAT group and I can't believe how quickly we built a great rapport and ability to laugh through all the intensity, both at ourselves and with each other. Seriously, laughing-out-loud, crying laughter. The teacher, Margaret is on the left. The others are Davis, Megan and Sarah. Good stuff, all.

To say the least, the intensity has not decreased. I thought that perhaps we would be learning and observing for at least the first few weeks and then teaching the last week or so, MAYBE the next-to-last week, but noooooooo.... we taught our first classes today! Yes, today. Our third day. With real, live Chilean students. Yikes. Of course we each only did a part of the class (20 minutes or so) and we were working with the beginners so they didn't know if we were or weren't doing it right... whew!

But I survived it... and having done so will make it that much easier with the class I will teach on Monday (40 minutes Monday!) and each future one. The workload is only going to get worse as we now have official lesson plans to create each day... in addition to all of the reading and the other homework.... but I can already see that the teaching time is going to soon become fun rather than nervewracking and no doubt it will soon be my favorite part of the school day... already I love the students I'm teaching!